What Happened?

By GARRY WILLS

Ronald Reagan did not build a structure; he cast a spell. There was no Reagan revolution, just a Reagan bedazzlement. The magic is going off almost as mysteriously as the spell was woven in the first place. There is no edifice of policies solid enough to tumble, piece by piece, its props being knocked out singly or in groups. The whole thing is not falling down; it was never weighty enough for that. It is simply evanescing.

To measure the disenchantment we must remember the power of the trance being dissipated. The Republican Convention of 1984, the love-in at Dallas, was a unique event in our politics. The cult of personality was carried embarrassingly far, but the adulation was all spontaneous and unfeigned -- and somehow nonpolitical.

Contending forces in the Republican Party suspended or muted their hostilities, each to enjoy its own share of the Reagan glory. Potential candidates tried to rub some of his magic onto their futures, but people were not really thinking of tomorrow. It was all a glorious today of heady triumph, + a happy blend of religiosity and athleticism. Reagan's principal appearances during the convention were at a prayer breakfast and for a speech that associated the runners who had just carried the Olympic flame across America with the torch-bearing Statue of Liberty. The crowd burst into cheers of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" This transcended normal politics. It was the politics of ecstasy. A Nuremberg rally without the menace.

The only "issue" of the convention was Ronald Reagan's Teflon invulnerability; the principal activity was a delight in sharing his life. This was accomplished not so much by actual appearances at the convention (he came late and moved about little) but by way of the films he had made before he arrived. The 18-minute film that introduced the President's speech at the convention made Reagan himself cry when he first saw it. The one that introduced Nancy was even more touching, ending with his tribute to her. When Nancy went onstage, Reagan appeared on the screen behind her, watching her on his hotel TV, and the crowd shouted and gestured her around to see him and hug the airy apparition above her. It was the consummation of the weird political transaction that was the Dallas convention.

Reagan as symbol of America, as angel of our better natures, as reconciler of our meaner aspects into a smiling strength, as folksy commander of a worldwide empire -- all these were images too high or too deep for ordinary political criticism. How he came to that eminence was a matter of shared history between him and the American electorate -- shared innocence about the responsibilities of great power, about what he deplores as "government" in keeping the accounts of a great nation and a world power.

Shift the scene to Reykjavik. That too was a summit unlike all others. Reagan even denied that it was a summit. It was just an informal meeting of the minds, where he could exercise his charm; and it too seemed verging toward a love-in. The President was accompanied by experts with varying attitudes on arms control, men who deferred superficially to Reagan's vision of a Strategic Defense Initiative entirely benevolent, so purely defensive in nature that its secrets could be shared with the world once it was put in place. Members of his Administration nodded along, as they had at the prayer breakfast in Dallas.

But to some SDI was a bargaining chip for getting real agreements; for others it was an excuse to militarize space before the Soviets could; for still others it was a plausible pretext for breaking the antiballistic-missile treaty. Hardly anyone believed the pure-and-simple defensive-shield story that had been sold to the American people in, appropriately, a television cartoon. Hardly anyone, that is, but Reagan. To the horror of those around him, Reagan -- with the amiable way he has of thinking he can sell anything so obviously good as his own intentions -- began to bargain away all ballistic missiles (perhaps all nuclear weapons; it is impossible to get the story straight). Reagan, the roseate accommodator, had believed his own cover story. So his helpers had to scurry around, trying to touch down again on some reality after the nightmare love-in of Reykjavik.

That was not an easy assignment. Those around Reagan had entered his world of pretense over the preceding months. They had pretended to agree with him while working for their own goals, working often against others who were also pretending to be following Reagan's vision, each claiming to have the Reagan stamp of approval, each trying to make it work for them, while Reagan serenely believed the cover story that they were only feigning to believe.

The attempt to use the Reagan magic involved a compromising entry into his world of pretense. Aides defended the Reagan fairy tales; editors treated his errors with restraint; the public punished those who were too critical of his whoppers. It was a vast communal exercise in make-believe. There had to be more to Reagan than shallowness and deception, since he was so clearly sincere and his sincerity impressed others so indelibly. He became invulnerable in his personal appeal and winsomeness, and others had to summon up more and more of their own credulity along with expressions of respect. The very fabric of our politics was shot through with unreality. The Secretary of State pretended to be following a strong President while he was yielding to shadowy figures in the Executive Office Building, contributing to the surreal nature of this whole presidency. The love-in at Dallas had moved to the banks of the Potomac.

Reagan's was a government run against government. Government is the problem, not the solution, in his formula. Admittedly, Reagan loves government as ceremony and majesty. The rituals of his office, so irksome to other Presidents, were the things he liked best and did best. He gave out medals and awards enthusiastically (and generously: the military granted more medals for % Grenada than actual troops landed there). Heroic government, on the epic scale, was his favorite movie -- the happy Nuremberg rally.

Reagan also loved government as the derring-do of secret agents. Private heroics by the CIA, the FBI -- the kind of mission he felt he had participated in when informing on fellow actors during the Communist hunt in Hollywood -- appealed to his storytelling sense, to his belief in the lone individual's ability to save a situation. The rescue of hostages by such heroes would be a perfect blend of government as private heroics and government as glittery ceremony: the photo opportunity for the returning hostages was an image almost irresistible to Reagan.

But government as accountability is the government Reagan hates -- the need for policy to connect the anecdotes he thinks in, to trace consequences, to lay legal groundwork, to account for funds, to consider precedent. Routine, procedure, bureaucracy -- all these offend the dramatic instincts of Reagan, which call for the single interposition that turns the tide.

The civil service mind is at the antipodes of the heroic individual. Americans share this scorn for bureaucracy, which George Wallace had capitalized on in the elections preceding Reagan's. There is something depressing to the American spirit about having to keep the accounts of a world empire. We would have the empire without the sophisticated, compromising, accommodating mentality that it takes to administer vast responsibilities. We would keep the mores of a small village -- indeed of Reagan's own youth -- in a time of great technological change and manipulation. Individual heroes were produced at State of the Union addresses to represent the "real America" in our complex age of interdependence.

Having to pretend with Reagan that ordinary government is a deadening imposition on the citizens, not their forum or their court of appeals, officials in the Reagan Administration could only move him with stirring tales or magic weapons -- with SDI, with an economic program that promised to eliminate government interference, with secret raids of punishment or rescue. The ordinary work of government had to go on under the claim that it was being phased out -- a dream of the absurd that reached its peak in David Stockman's strenuous exercise in omnidirectional pretense. Reagan called Stockman into his office to assure him that the press accounts of what was going on at the Office of Management and Budget were false. Stockman knew they were not false but had to pretend they were, because that pleased the President. Pretending to believe the pretended things the President actually believed became a governmental duty. Irresponsibility was institutionalized in its root sense -- nonresponsiveness to reality. One can give no account of a reality one has been compelled, often enough, to deny.

The nonresponsiveness of the President to his own crisis came not only from his own instincts to deny unpleasant realities but from the long-standing adjustments of the machinery of government around him to humor him in his beliefs, however bizarre -- to use those beliefs to feign agreement, even to play with the temptation of believing when that was profitable. It was a happy Nuremberg, after all. Since the people wanted to be fooled, and enjoyed it so, why should one resist the fooling? "Keep lying to us" was the implicit plea of the electorate. No wonder many people around Reagan learned so well to respond to that plea. At Reykjavik, the glow began to go off -- the jolliers- along of Reagan's SDI fantasies saw him about to give up the Western arsenal! With Iran, it dimmed more: the great charmer of Gorbachev was going to woo hostages out of Khomeini's regime!

The man who had done so many impossible things in his own mind was now trying to do undesirable things in the real world. So bits and pieces of the real world began to reappear, looking as improbable as the pretense they must compete with. The process is not like refuting an argument. It is more like breaking a spell.